


Questions Asked

by Merkwerkee



Category: Void Jumpers
Genre: Multiple Pov, same event different narrators
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:54:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27373027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee
Summary: When the whole crew gets sucked into a fracture of the space-time continuum, they meet a person who will answer one question truthfully for them. The show showcased the main characters, but it happened to the *entire crew.*So here's some questions asked by crewmembers of the good ship Haven.
Kudos: 1





	Questions Asked

If it wasn’t for the burning, howling unreality in front of him, Milt Felling would be highly intrigued by the place he found himself in.

Truth to tell he was still intrigued - it wasn’t every day you got sucked into an inter-dimensional void between reality and unreality; that was usually reserved for the annual arcano-engineer Company mixer - but getting away from the shredding inverse of nothingness in front of him was a higher priority. It wasn’t sucking him toward it yet, but that was highly likely to change at any moment. He’d been in one too many prototype explosions to think otherwise.

Milt spun in place, looking to see if there was an obvious path back, and was surprised to see the entire ship’s complement standing in the space with him. The rest of the engineers were closest, with the rest of the crew spread out somewhat randomly - the largest group was a gaggle in the uniforms of ship’s cooks, looking terrified and clinging to one another. The command crew and the away teams were standing closest to the only other figure Milt didn’t recognize, some guy done up in a Dunklesnicht costume carrying some kind of staff weapon.

Milt could only be glad he didn’t have to deal with that guy. Completing his rotation, he saw the Fire system stretching out behind what looked to be some kind of filter or barrier. It wasn’t close enough to touch, and one glance at his instruments saw the readouts spewing page after page of strange glyphs he didn’t recognize. He flipped record on, because glyphs he didn’t recognize were rare and he’d really like to have data to analyze later, but stowed the detectors away in their cases after doing so. Whatever the hell they were picking up wasn’t useful right this second; he’d have to figure this one out the hard way. He took a step-

_The world shattered._

Milt found himself standing on a fragment of reality. Above him he could see an infinite number of other shards spinning in directions human minds weren’t truly mean to contemplate and which translated to his human brain as simply “away.” A quick glance around showed him he was at once standing before the figure in the costume he’d seen earlier, and also doing an infinite number of other things in an unknown number of ways. He was standing here, but he was also fixing Haven’s engines, tinkering with the Void Jumper, getting a drink, getting some exercise, eating dinner, lunch, breakfast, midnight snack, kissing his wife, kissing his husband, ruffling his kid’s hair -

Milt forcibly looked away from everything and focused back on the figure in the costume. He had so very many questions; what was this place, what was the figure, how could he replicate this, what was the hungry place he’d seen, what were his personal scanning devices actually picking up, what were those strange symbols, was he even still alive -

What actually came out of his mouth was “so, uh. Is this real?”

The figure seemed to consider for a moment.

“Yes, in as much as anything can be real. Crossing the borders of Reality to get here as we did meant we had to cross the borders of all Reality, not just the thread which you are currently experiencing. When the Heir shattered the tether, he did so across all Reality and, just for this moment, your limited mortal understanding is allowed to see all the permutations of Reality and not just the linear one created from the choices you have made in the past.”

Milt considered this for a moment. “But then why-”

_Reality collapsed._

Milt found himself standing in the tiny machine shop he’d been relegated to since Baxter’s desertion. Not a single tool was out of place that hadn’t been knocked about before that strange event, and there were no alarms blaring overhead. He looked around, still feeling a tad shell-shocked.

“Huh.” He said.

And then he leaned over and threw up all over the floor.

* * *

Claire was not certain she liked this place.

The part in front of her looked awful scary - like a big, hungry mouth - but it couldn’t get to her because of the curtain. Behind her was much nicer, with the stars all glittering and the planet all glowing red. The moons made a nice contrast to it. She liked looking that way.

She didn’t like the scary man standing in front of her daddy. He was tall and he sounded funny and he carried a big stick. There was something about him that reminded her of the hungry place, though, a kind of sensation like he’d gobble her all up and not be sorry about it afterward. He looked scary-mean, but her daddy was between her and the hungry man, so that was okay. Her daddy could stop _anything_ , and he’d _never_ let the scary man hurt her.

She was watching the pretty red planet slowly turn when-

_Everything broke._

Claire blinked. She was alone, and the scary-hungry man was right in front of her. The sky above him was weird; it was like the time she’d accidentally broken daddy’s glass tablet, all pieces and broken jagged edges with rainbows glimmering on them flying apart at once very fast and very slow.

Daddy wasn’t there.

She looked around and saw herself, also looking around, and that was scary too, so she looked back at the scary-hungry man as her eyes began to water. “Are you going to eat me?” She asked in a wobbly voice.

The scary-hungry man didn’t move. “Yes. It is our nature to consume everything; when the Continuum is destroyed, nothing shall remain before us. We will swallow all of creation, and finally each other. So were we made, so shall we do.”

That sounded even _worse_ to Claire! The scary-hungry man was going to eat everything up, like the wolf in the story her daddy would read to her sometimes before bed. They’d eat the stars, and the planets, and-

 _“Daddy!”_ Claire screamed-

_Everything collapsed inward._

As the warm lights of the Captain’s room off the bridge became real around her, Claire wobbled. She felt bad, dizzy, and she really just wanted her daddy.

Plunking herself down on the floor, she leaned her head back and _wailed_.

* * *

Arrn had been polishing one of the Fire-powered lasers when the magic took hold.

Suddenly finding himself standing in the middle of nowhere on nothing and staring down the gaping maw of a hellscape was mildly concerning. The fact that he was also doing so without the F'laser he’d been holding in his hands not ten seconds ago was highly irritating. Fire-powered weaponry was harder to manufacture than your average Void-powered blasters, but the difference in damage dealt more than made up for the difficulty. Your standard Void-blaster could put a decent-sized hole in your average soft target; the smallest Fire-powered laser you could buy would punch a two-inch hole through five inches of steel. Starship security forces were not allowed to carry F'lasers for that reason, but the Haven had a few onboard because, well, you’d never know when or where you’d need them when escorting around dignitaries.

He performed a quick area scan/threat assessment, and zeroed in immediately on the person standing way too close to the command/VIP contingent. The person was tall, of indeterminate gender and age - and was also carrying the most impressive glaive Arrn had ever seen. Half again as long as the person wielding it, the blade was polished to almost mirrored sheen with edges that looked sharp enough to cut between atoms. He’d seen some monomolecularly-edged weaponry in his time, but he’d never seen anyone foolish enough to put it at the end of a polearm. And, truth to tell, this blade looked even sharper still.

On the one hand, it was kind of his job to at least try and put himself between such an obvious threat and the VIPs. On the other hand, Rex was already standing nearly in hand-to-hand distance with the hooded figure and she was a good kid more than capable of taking down one asshole with a polearm all by herself. Plus if he tried to ease up between the VIPs and Hoodie he’d have to get closer to the clawing, grasping _nothing_ on the other side of some kind of veil in front of him, and he really, really didn’t want to do that.

On the other other hand, he didn’t have to go forward to get between some of the other crew members and Hoodie, so Arrn shifted his weight and prepared to take a step and-

_Reality shattered like glass._

Arrn found himself standing on a plane that was at once infinite and infinitesimal; before him stood the Hooded Figure, well within the reach of the glaive it still carried. Above him the sky was a-whirl with broken pieces, spinning this way and that like snowflakes in a blizzard. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw - impossible things. Things he absolutely refused to contemplate. He concentrated on the figure in front of him instead.

“Am I going to have to _deal_ with you?”

The question was a reflex; being so far out of his depth pushed him back to old habits, ones that had kept him alive for year after year of serving as Company muscle.

The figure before him spread its hands in a gesture Arrn might interpret as helpless if it hadn’t included the nine-foot glaive. “You are dealing with us now; as it stands, however, your interactions with the timeline have been minimal, inconsequential. Your thread of reality interacts with ours very little, and if you stay on the path you have chosen they will remain that way. You will continue to maintain the armory on the ship, handing weapons and gear to others, and nothing of true consequence will come of your life. You will die an old man, alone in your bunk, and be buried in the soil of your home planet to rot in peace.”

The figure spoke without even a tinge of judgement in their tone; whatever else, they seemed to truly not give a single shit about him or anything he did. Arrn wasn’t sure if he was offended or pleased by this; he opened his mouth to say something - a witty quip, a snarky rejoinder, something - he-

_The shards collapsed._

Finding himself suddenly standing back in the armory holding the precious F'laser was jarring. The vertigo and nausea that rushed in a second later were surprising only in their force, and Arrn had to put down the F'laser for a second as he breathed through them. He didn’t throw up - he’s had to deal with much worse in his years as a Problem-Solver - but it was a little closer than he’d like. A quick glance around to make sure nothing had fallen from where he’d secured it - nothing had; when he’d felt the evasive maneuvers start he’d locked his workspace down tighter than a miser’s purse - and a quick motion to magnetically secure the F'laser to a nearby weapon mooring allowed him to go to the small room that contained his bunk with a clear conscience.

Looking around at the small space, bare of anything truly personal save for the weapons he’d picked up over the years as trophies, he was reminded vividly of what the figure had said. _“You will die an old man, alone in your bunk, and be buried in the soil of your home planet to rot in peace.”_ He threw himself down on the bunk and smiled.

That was really all he’d asked for, after all.

* * *

Luke was _not_ having a good time.

Naturally high-strung, suddenly finding himself standing on nothing and staring into a place that his lizard brain gibbered at even attempting to understand was giving him heart palpitations. Blindly he flailed around to his left where he’d remembered Zaza standing before something weird had happened to throw them here, and managed to get a hold of her arm. “Zaza, oh Elements preserve us, Zaza, we’re going to die, it’s going to kill us and suck the marrow from our bones and destroy us in tiny microns we can’t fight it we can’t survive oh elementselementselements-”

A resounding crack confused him for a moment as he head jerked around, and then the pain made itself known. He swung around to face - ah. Not Zaza.

Fran glared down at him, the white showing all the way around her eyes belying her fierce expression. “Now _ain’t_ the time to panic, Luke. We gotta hold on to _something_ or this whole thing’ll fall apart and then we’ll _really_ be in the soup.”

Luke gulped and nodded, looking around. Besides the - _oh dear sweet elemental creators preserve us_ \- howling void in front of them, the reassuring red of the Fire planet hung in space behind them. Above and below them were just stars, and all around them seemed to be some kind of darkness both supporting them and keeping them separate from the void. It didn’t look particularly strong to Luke, but it’d been doing the job so far.

He turned back to Fran, whose elbow he still clutched. “So-”

_Everything exploded._

Luke found himself standing right in front of a tall figure wearing a black robe and carrying some kind of long weapon. He stared at the blade on the end of it, hypnotized by the shining metal. That thing could kill him fast enough he probably wouldn’t even know it before he found out what came on the far side of life. He could almost see it now, sweeping down and slicing him in half, with the top taking a few minutes to fall, it was so clean. He could almost-

“Are you the Grim Reaper?” he asked the figure in front of him, mostly to drown out the images trying to overwhelm him with primordial terror.

The figure seems to consider this question for a moment. “No. I may be described as grim, but I am not here to harvest. I am here to collect the Heir and be gone - something which I have apparently failed to do. His continued resistance has grown irksome; we will need to take stronger measures, it seems, though this current attempt has failed utterly.”

“Oh.”

Luke didn’t quite know what to say to that. He wasn’t sure what an Heir was, and while failing at something sucked he couldn’t help but feel a little glad such a scary person hadn’t gotten what they wanted. Something in the back of his mind still gibbered about how the person in front of him could _absolutely_ kill him at a moment’s notice, and he didn’t really have much sympathy for murderers. He opened his mouth to offer some kind of meaningless platitude-

_Everything collapsed._

Luke staggered as he found himself back in the galley of Haven, almost knocking a dazed-looking Zaza to the floor. The various other cooks looked about as good as Luke himself felt. He blinked, feeling his head start to swim. “I-”

He fainted to the sound of Big Mike cursing up a storm.

* * *

There was something at once terrible and fascinating about the whirling unreality that raged behind the veil in front of her.

Mika wasn’t one much for mysticism; sure, everything worked on magic but that was no reason to go assigning spiritual value to it. You plugged your grill in, let the Void energy spin up the heating coils, and went about your day. Nothing special to that, it was just what you did if you were a cook. Worrying about what was going to happen to you when you died didn’t get the morning flapjacks made or the orange juice squeezed; there were just better things to do with her time.

Still, seeing the burning, swirling maw in front of her was rapidly beginning to make her rethink this stance. She leaned over to Zip, who appeared to be having some kind of religious experience, and jabbed him hard in the shoulder with one finger. “What do you make of that?” She asked, gesturing to the sight in front of them.

Zip didn’t quite answer her, but he half-turned so that whatever he’d been saying became audible to her. “…So shall the elements wither and wane before the Unmaker, but the Continuum shall be the light evermore and save us from the Darkness…”

Mika tuned him out; whatever was going on in that head of his was obviously pretty far removed from whatever reality they were currently experiencing. She turned in a slow circle; besides Zip standing next to her, the rest of the kitchen staff was clumped up pretty close together and the rest of the crew kinda spread out along…whatever the Void they were standing on. Furthest forward were the special guests and the command folks, and furthest back were the new brig security people they’d picked up to replace the ones who hadn’t survived the Company rep’s short but tyrannical reign aboard ship.

She turned a little more to see what was behind them, and-

_Everything exploded._

Mika blinked as pieces of reality danced before her eyes; looking around didn’t bring any further clarity as all she saw was herself. Doing things - washing dishes, mostly, though there was the odd scene of her attending some kind of rocket launch, or being handed a certificate on a stage, or being murdered in an alley. She blinked and turned away from that last one hurriedly; it didn’t seem to bode well for how this whole situation was going to turn out.

As she looked away from that scene, a tall, hooded figure caught her eye. Seven foot tall at least, she’d’ve piled their plate high if they’d come into her kitchen. There was something _hungry_ about them; she would bet there wouldn’t be any meat on their bones if she could see through the flowing layers they wore.

Or maybe she wouldn’t give ‘em a plate at all, not if they were still carrying that pig-sticker they clutched in one hand. Mika had a strict no-weapons policy for the galleys she worked in, and the rest of the staff aboard Haven had been quick to agree with her. Kitchen implements were one thing; sure, you could murder people with ‘em but that tended to dull the blades dreadfully so you were better off just using them to, y'know, _actually cook_. Weapons just made for killing were worse than useless in a kitchen - even blasters.

“Who’re you supposed to be, then?” She asked, using her best I’m-not-impressed voice.

The hooded figure didn’t seem to care. “I am Asahel Keturah Pipe-Wolferstan, and we are the Other. I am supposed to be servant of the Heir, but I cannot be so until he takes up his true purpose and name. Until he does, I am merely the one chosen to deal with Reality to make him take up his duties to us.” They paused for the merest sliver on an instant. “It is…uncomfortable, but I am the second best able to exist in Reality, and so it is my duty to do so.”

Mika raised an eyebrow. “Well, it seems to me-”

_Everything collapsed._

Mika blinked through the sudden wooziness of finding herself back in the kitchen of Haven. Zaza was hyperventilating, Luke had straight-up fainted, Zip sounded like he was still praying, Fran was clutching her face and weeping, Hank was making unpleasant noises in the corner, and Zeiriogh was breathing heavily from where they were leaning on the counter. Mika barely registered her count was off before a nasty sizzling noise heralded a bout of cursing from behind her; she spun around to find Big Mike near the stove, cradling one hand with the other. Apparently he’d tried to copy Zeiriogh in leaning on something, but had chosen his leaning surface poorly.

Mika heaved a sigh and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “What a rotten way to get out of a conversation,” she remarked to no-one. If the universe somehow carried her parting shot to Asahel, it gave no sign, and she went over to start tending to Mike’s hand.

One mess at a time, in her kitchen.

* * *

Today was definitely going to be a red-letter day in her daybook, and not in a good way.

To be fair, Fran didn’t get too many red-letter days, full stop. There was the day she got assigned to Haven, that’d been a good one; the day Silas had kissed her and promised her his hand, that’d been a really excellent one; the day she’d gotten a letter and Silas’ ring from the Company, that’d been a bad one; the day Roger’d been eaten by the giant bug on the Bloom planet, that’d been a bad one; and so on, and so forth. Point being, there were more bad red-letter days than good ones, and this was shaping up to be a really bad red-letter one.

For starters, she was standing on nothing in the middle of nowhere with what looked like the descriptions of the Underworld the local cults used to try and scare people with back on her home world stretched out in front of her. Standing to her right was Luke and to her left was Zaza, and she could hear Zip babbling somewhere behind her; he sounded like he’d taken some kind of religion to heart and was regurgitating it to deal with whatever was going on in his head. Fran mentally dismissed him as unhelpful and started to turn around when something grabbed a hold of her elbow.

Spinning to face the possible threat, she found herself face to saucer-plate-sized-eyes face with Luke. He was also babbling, though he sounded a _lot_ more hysterical than Zip did. Voice high and breathy, chest going like someone on speed pumping a bellows, pupils the approximate size of pinpricks - Luke was clearly less than ten seconds away from complete meltdown. So Fran did the only thing she could think of to snap him out of it.

She slapped him.

 _Hard_.

“Now ain’t the time to panic, Luke. We gotta hold on to something or this whole thing’ll fall apart and then we’ll really be in the soup.” He stared at her owl-eyed as she spoke, the imprint of her hand reddening on his cheek, and nodded jerkily while making an odd gulping noise - like he’d tried to swallow but didn’t have anything in his mouth _to_ swallow. His eyes were still darting around crazily, however, and he had a glint in them she didn’t like.

He opened his mouth and said hoarsely “so-”

_Everything exploded._

Fran found herself moving very fast and yet at the same time standing perfectly still as reality fractured like a cheap window. Luke’s hand was gone from her elbow, and the whirling shards of what she had the nasty feeling was literally Everything were going too fast for her to see if he’d ended up in one of those. The fragments were actually kind of pretty, in the same way that broken glass could reflect rainbows if turned just right, but the fact that they were fragments and not whole was probably a bad thing.

So entranced was she by the whirling bits of Reality above her, she didn’t even realize someone was standing in front of her until they cleared their throat. Or at least, made a noise like they were clearing their throat, and she glanced down in surprise. The figure was tall, taller than Big Mike - no mean feat as Big Mike was the biggest person she’d ever seen - and shrouded from head to toe in black cloth. They looked almost funerary in that get-up, and a terrible thought struck her as she glanced between them and the broken sky above.

Fran took a deep breath, and asked the question that had plagued her mind for decades. “How did Silas really die?”

She’d asked that question many times of many different people, and had never gotten a satisfactory answer. There was no real reason this person would know who Silas was, or anything about him but - that clothing. That weapon. The broken sky above them. If she didn’t at least ask, she’d hate herself for the rest of her life.

The figure looked at her - or maybe through her - for a long moment before answering. “Silas Marner was an informational security specialist in a minor branch of The Company on the planet most notable for its vast reserves of the elemental magic your kind classifies as 'water.’ He was a dependable worker, and good at his job - too good. One day he intercepted leaked plans for a siphon the Company had planned for the planet on which he stood, plans he knew were illegal. He deleted them, and all mentions of them, from the Company database. The Company sent a Problem Solver to his quarters, who beat him to death in an attempt to retrieve the plans. If the Problem Solver had not arrived when he did, Silas would have been summarily executed by the Industrialist faction who had been responsible for trying to data-mine the leak in the first place and whose kill team was waiting outside while the Problem Solver worked.”

Fran’s mind went blank. she’d always suspected the Company had been involved - that it hadn’t been an accident - that - that-

_Everything collapsed._

Finding herself standing back in the kitchen of Haven, not having moved a single inch from where she could remember being before being sucked into space was surreal. Not a single ladle was out of place, not a pot had moved, and yet everything had changed. Everything was different. Silas had died a good man, and he’d died at the hands of the Company - _the Company she was working for_.

It was all too much. Fran buried her face in her hands and _wept_.

* * *

Zaza was _fascinated_.

The constantly-moving energy patterns of the whatever that was in front of her were mesmerizing. The sudden unpredictable shifts that drew the eye for just a moment, only for something else to change and attract her attention - she felt like she could stare at it for hours. If only there wasn’t that weird darkness in the way so she could see it properly. She reached out, but her hands met nothing; whatever was between her and those wonderful, swirling flames was at once close enough to touch and far out of reach.

She took a step forward, and another, and then-

_Everything exploded._

If Zaza had thought the flames were beautiful, they had nothing on the whirling shards of Reality itself that spun in an infinite number of fragments above her head. She couldn’t see into any of them, of course - she suspected that was her eyes failing to comprehend what they were seeing, rather than any actual attempt by the universe to keep her from peeking. She huffed, impatient with the failings of her optic nerves - the Company did offer upgrades, but they cost an arm and a leg and Zaza’d never be able to afford them on her salary as a cook - and nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard a low laugh in response.

Looking around suspiciously, her eyes landed on a strange figure dressed all in black. Strange costume, she thought, and turned her gaze back to the sky in its infinite complexity.

“I want to see this all the time,” she stated baldly, never taking her eyes off the up there.

“You would wish this view all the time?” The figure sounded surprised. Zaza snorted.

“Of course, who wouldn’t? The firey place wasn’t too shabby either.”

There was a long stretch of silence.

“Seek me out on your return, and I’ll give you the eyes to see what you so desperately desire.”

Zaza dropped her gaze from the sky, finally. “How-”

_Everything collapsed._

_-do I find you_ died on her lips as she took in the boring normality of the kitchen around her. She could feel her heart racing and her breath coming in too fast as she tried to reign in the feelings that adventure had brought out in her. Clearly she needed to find the guy dressed all in black, and asap.

 _After I finish cleaning,_ she amended mentally as Hank threw up in the corner. Sighing, she went and fetched the mop and bucket and got to work.

* * *

Hank felt like he ought to be sick.

He’d never had a head for heights, and from when he could see there was nothing below him but a long, long way to fall. Whatever he was standing on was at least semi-transparent, reminding him vividly of the time his little sister had convinced him to walk on the glass bridge that went out over a waterfall on the Bloom planet. It was apparently a must-see on all the tourist guides, but he’d very nearly had a heart attack just taking the first few steps and his sister had eventually given up and gone the rest of the way without him. He’d been dragged off the clear surface after she’d left by a kindly security guard who’d forced him to drink two cups of peppermint tea before releasing him from “custody.”

The strange thing this time was that he wasn’t sick. At least, not sick to his stomach; he couldn’t look up from the vast emptiness of space beneath his feet, but he didn’t feel like he was about to throw up. Maybe those therapy sessions his sister had forced him to go to after the bridge incident hadn’t been a total waste of time after all.

He still couldn’t look up, though.

He felt Big Mike’s hand - no way it was anyone else, Big Mike had hands big enough he needed custom oven mitts - settle between his shoulder blades. “Breathe,” the bigger man commanded with his deep voice and Hank sucked in a breath, the spots at the edge of his vision clearing. He could feel Mike’s hand giving him a soothing rub. “You gonna be-”

_Everything exploded._

Hank missed Mike’s hand on his back immediately, but at least whatever the hell he was standing on now was opaque. He looked up and around, and blinked in surprise. He saw himself, but like, in a weird funhouse-mirror kind of way. The reflections - if that’s what they really were - nearest to him looked the most like him, while the more outlandish ones looked like they were further away - though he wasn’t sure if distance had a real meaning here.

Though, actually, that wasn’t quite right. The nearest person to him didn’t look like him at all. Hank wasn’t seven foot tall, for one, and for another he’d never wear a crown. He’d despised them ever since his sister had shoved the paper crown you’d get from Void Burger Conglomerate for your birthday down over his eyes and given him paper cuts on both ears and the bridge of his nose.

Which, of course, begged the question. “Why are you wearing a crown?” He asked the not-him figure.

They shifted uncomfortably - or maybe they didn’t, Hank’s eyes couldn’t quite resolve the gesture they made. “It is a symbol of my power. I am a titan of the third order among my people, but human minds cannot even conceive of us in our entirety. Your minds simply interpret our power as a crown.”

“That’s cool?” Hank hazarded. What were you supposed to _say_ to something like that? Still-

_Everything collapsed._

Hank blinked around at the warmly-lit kitchen. It was good to firmly be planted back on the ground after- after-

He leaned over and threw up in the corner with the drain. Apparently he hadn’t _quite_ gotten over his fear of heights after all.

* * *

“The Continuum shall light my path; it shall drive away the darkness, and keep me safe.”

This place was everything the mystics of home had warned Zip about, from the swirling maw of the Unmaker in front of him to the vastness of space swirling to either side.

“I shall place my faith in the Continuum, that it may shelter me against the storms and the raging fires, and all that would destroy It’s joyous work.”

He couldn’t exactly confess himself regularly, being the only practicing Bright Spot Continuuist on the ship, but he made sure to send the proper percentage of his pay-packet home to the priests and they, in return, sent him monthly recordings of the lessons he missed by being aboard ship.

“For the Continuum holds the light, and life, of all the worlds safe in Its hands.”

Something poked him hard in the shoulder, and he half-turned while keeping up the Litany Against Darkness.

“When faith is gone, so shall the elements with and wane before the Unmaker, but the Continuum shall be the light evermore, and save us from the Darkness when all other hopes have failed.”

Mika was the one who’d poked him, but he couldn’t spare a thought for her right now. He-

_Everything exploded._

Zip couldn’t look up. The Continuum - the Continuum was - he couldn’t look up. Couldn’t look around, either; he could just see the terrible lies crowding the edges of his vision, versions of himself that have not existed and will never exist so he will not pay them any mind now. Looking down showed him a simple, opaque blackness, and in front of him was-

“Are you the Unmaker?” He blurted, heart seizing in his chest.

The terrible figure shrouded all in black with a bleak crown and black staff leaned over him, and Zip could feel its terrible, awful gaze in his very soul, and-

“One of them.” It replied.

Zip reeled back and-

_Everything collapsed._

Zip looked around at the warm, familiar shapes of the kitchen, closed his eyes, and prayed.

* * *

Michael “Big Mike” Derane was not an easy man to startle; when you were as big as he was, you didn’t have the luxury of starting at every little thing. When you moved instinctively, chances were better than even you’d accidentally elbow another person in the face - especially in the close quarters of a kitchen. If he’d become a Problem Solver like the Company reps had wanted him to, it wouldn’t’ve been a problem, but Big Mike liked cooking and so to the galley of Haven he went.

All that being said, he _definitely_ froze when something jerked him away from the stove he’d been in the process of shutting down - it would have been nice to have more warning before evasive maneuvers started, he’d been lucky there hadn’t been anything actively cooking on the stove when the Captain had done something that threw them all across the kitchen - and into a great, big, nothing.

He could see things all around him - things beyond just the other cooks, though it was good to see them here too - but they seemed to be separated from space by some kind of smoke. It didn’t bode well, but they also weren’t actively dying at that point so that was something. Well, most of them weren’t actively dying.

Big Mike walked over and put a hand carefully between Hank’s hunched shoulder blades. “Breathe,” he advised the shorter man, taking a deep breath himself to demonstrate. Hank sucked in a short breath that sounded like he’d just been dunked in a barrel of icy water, and Big Mike carefully started rubbing up and down the bony back beneath his hand. “Easy, you’re gonna be-”

_Everything exploded._

Big Mike found himself standing on a featureless plane while the world whirled above him. There was someone standing right in front of him, taller than he was, but he ignored them in favor of looking around. Everywhere he looked, he could see himself looking back, like a mirror maze or something.

Except no two of the reflections were exactly alike. Most of them looked like him, generally speaking, but one or two looked very different. It was one of the very different ones - a much-older version of himself with snow-white hair and, more importantly, a wedding ring - that caught his attention, and he stepped away from the weirdo in black to get a better look.

The older him smiled at his approach, and held out one wrinkled hand for him to shake. He took it, and looked himself straight in the eyes.

“Who?”

The older him’s smile grew dazzling. “Marlene Aschamps-Marie, in a little diner on the Void planet.”

Big Mike’s smile grew to match older him’s, and-

_Everything collapsed._

Big Mike found himself right back where he’d been, in front of the stove in the kitchen of Haven. His heart felt lighter than air, his stomach was doing flip-flops, and a whole lifetime had passed since he’d last been here. A wave of dizziness struck him and he had to put both hands down to make sure he wouldn’t fall over.

A mistake.

A nasty sizzling noise preceded a burning pain in his hand made him jerk his hand away from the still-hot stove top. “Blighted son of a dog and serpent!” he roared - one of his mother’s favorite curses, from way back. “Void-begotten cock-mangling rotten-”

* * *

This wasn’t how they’d really expected this day to go.

Granted, Zeiriogh was pretty certain that “the way they’d expected today to go” had gotten shot in the foot somewhat further back than “being launched into the void between spaces,” but this was pretty much the icing on the cake. Unexpected evasive maneuvers, fine, nobody’d been handling a knife at least and they could always clean up the mess from the not-quite-empty gravy boat, but being yanked out of the ship to watch the VIPs and Command crew jaw with some weirdo in a shroud?

Yeah, that hadn’t really been on the docket for today.

Still, at least it didn’t look like they were going to be consumed by the awful flames any time soon. Whatever they were standing on seemed firm enough, and was possibly also responsible for keeping the flames from coming any closer which, honestly, was a relief. Zeiriogh had dealt with a fair amount of nonsense in their tenure with the Company, but reality-warping flames were the purview of actual scientists and not cooks, and they’d very much like to keep it that way.

They looked around, noting that the rest of the cooks were standing reasonably close to them. A lot closer than the rest of the crew, anyway, though they weren’t sure how much distance actually meant in this place. The furthest one away looked like one of the engineers, and he appeared to be pirouetting which was about what they expected from an engineer in a place that defied the normal laws of physics. They could only hope the hapless engineer didn’t get any ideas or there stood the real possibility of a repeat performance.

The thought made them facepalm, but just as their hand reached their face-

_Everything exploded._

Zeiriogh slowly removed their hand from their face as it became apparent that things had changed yet again. This time it looked like none of the crew were nearby. Instead, they saw a tall figure wearing all black and carrying a glaive standing at attention nearby. They gave the whole ensemble 10/10 for good thinking - a glaive was a nice, versatile weapon - but minus several million points for style. All black did nothing but make you overheat; if you wanted to blend in, you were better off going with neutral mottling of brown and grey, and if you wanted to stand out you’d highlight the important parts in other colors to really emphasize the black.

Whatever; whoever this person was, it wasn’t Zeiriogh’s job to tell them they’d fucked up their outfit. Whoever they had to do that had obviously fallen down on the job, but if you were good at something you should never do it for free - or so they’d heard.

Zeiriogh huffed a gusty sigh. “Is there likely to be a repeat performance of this?” They asked in their most bored, disinterested tone.

The figure shifted slightly. “No; you may thank the Heir for even this much. Such a shattering has never happened before, and is all the more proof we must cut this iteration short. That the Heir could do this with only the most basic grasp of the abilities open to him is…troubling. We will have to try harder to bring him back and try again or this entire cycle could end badly for everyone.”

Zeiriogh didn’t like the sound of that. They straightened out of their careful slouch, and tried to look the other person straight in the eye. “You mean-”

_Everything collapsed._

Zeiriogh blinked as the kitchen swam into and out of focus around them. Wherever they had been, the journey back had been one hell of a ride. They leaned against the counter and tried to breathe through the nausea.

_Fucking doomsayers._


End file.
